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Booking.com is a big place where newbies will be sitting with lots of experienced people they can ask and discuss with over lunch/coffee. I doubt that smaller

Booking.com is a big place where newbies will be sitting with lots of experienced people they can ask and discuss with over lunch/coffee. I doubt that smaller places will see so fast ramp up that they don't bother to hire people that know the language environment. The language in itself is quite irrelevant, but building a taste and learning the standard libs (here -- CPAN) takes time. That goes for every environment. Edit: It would be interesting to hear the experience on this at other big shops? Maybe material for an academic article, someone? Edit 2: I might add -- the differences between the scripting languages seems a bit overblown in the article. The languages (Perl, Ruby et al) aren't that different. Here I argued about the environment and standard libraries, which takes many, many hours for at least Python and Perl. And for taste -- to not have anonymous functions in Python needs changes in how you code. And so on.

avar 12y ago
Almost all the libraries you deal with are in-house. Which is part of what I'm pointing out, most of getting up to speed in any company is learning about their domain-specific codebase, not the language they happen to be using. You're certainly at an advantage if you know some of those things already, that goes without saying. I'm just pointing out that many people seem to overestimate the impact of the programming language on the overall stack. Knowing DB workflows, distributed programming etc. is much more important than knowing language trivia which you can mostly trivially look up.
- BugBrother 12y ago
  I don't disagree. My point was, to take a simple example, at places like Booking.com [new] people will typically find out about the used CPAN Date classes from the code or their table neighbour. Not by rolling their own or crawling all of the CPAN before finding DateTime. But sure, the internal code will be a bigger issue.

avar 12y ago

Almost all the libraries you deal with are in-house. Which is part of what I'm pointing out, most of getting up to speed in any company is learning about their domain-specific codebase, not the language they happen to be using. You're certainly at an advantage if you know some of those things already, that goes without saying. I'm just pointing out that many people seem to overestimate the impact of the programming language on the overall stack. Knowing DB workflows, distributed programming etc. is much more important than knowing language trivia which you can mostly trivially look up.

BugBrother 12y ago
I don't disagree. My point was, to take a simple example, at places like Booking.com [new] people will typically find out about the used CPAN Date classes from the code or their table neighbour. Not by rolling their own or crawling all of the CPAN before finding DateTime. But sure, the internal code will be a bigger issue.